Ba Jin: What Might Have Been

By

Perry Link

Updated Oct. 28, 2005 12:01 a.m. ET

China needs and deserves a writer of deep humanism to do what Primo Levi has done in examining the Holocaust, or Alexandr Solzhenitsyn the Soviet gulag. The famed writer Ba Jin, who died this month at age 100, might have made such an attempt had he enjoyed the same freedom to write in the 1980s that he had in the 1930s.

Ba Jin lived long enough to see modern Chinese letters through its two most dynamic eras -- the "Chinese renaissance" years of the May Fourth era (late 1910s to mid-1930s) and the post-Mao...